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Overcoming today’s brand challenges in a changing media economy

We sat down with Lidl to discuss brand challenges and how they’re winning through investing in their owned media and influencer marketing channels.

From its unique position of working with many of the world’s leading media owners, agencies and brands, Kantar Media is often exposed to many different views and perspectives on key industry challenges. We recently spoke with Lidl’s Gianfranco Brunetti and Jakob Denjakin to get their take on how to overcome brand challenges and how brands can use influencer marketing to leverage today’s emerging media and reach new audiences.

Gianfranco Brunetti is Marketing Director - Head of International Brand & Strategy and PR & Social Media at Lidl

Keeping the momentum during growth

German global retailer, Lidl, started from humble beginnings. Entering the market in 1973 with one store and three employees, the discount grocery store turned retail giant has gone through several growth periods, today operating over 10,000 stores in 30 countries and continuing to expand.

As a discount supermarket, affordable prices are achieved through a committed focus on efficiency, including a much smaller range of products than offered in traditional stores. Retaining this efficiency through periods of rapid expansion does not come without its growing pains, thus creating the need to reduce complexity, while increasing consistency across the business. “We already call 28 countries our home and are expanding our core business into the United States and Serbia. Ongoing modernization of our stores and logistic systems enable us to successfully adapt to changing customer needs.”
Gianfranco Brunetti - Marketing Director - Head of International Brand & Strategy and PR & Social Media, Lidl International

Overcoming complexity with Integrated Communications

With such fast growth, Lidl’s retail locations face a balancing act to ensure their marketing and communications support their global messaging and local stores, build the brand long-term and support sales in the short-term across both food and non-food categories – these are among the many challenges.

As an added measure, Lidl approached Kantar Media in 2015 to discuss how its TGI currency data could be used to aid their integrated communication practices across all markets. With Lidl stores in 28 markets and Kantar Media’s TGI study in more than 65, the partnership offers a unique opportunity to uncover global insights into consumers habits and attitudes from a single source.

Using Kantar Media’s TGI data and in partnership with their media agencies, Lidl was able to adapt channel plans and messaging to different audiences in different countries, while still maintaining a level of consistency. With access to global audience segmentation data sets, Lidl can understand different consumer targets based on attitudes and purchase behaviors.

Influencer marketing as an incorporation of integrated communication

For Lidl, influencer marketing serves the brand well, raising the brand‘s profile and delivering against purchase and first choice to reach consumers.
An international framework for influencer marketing was crucial for Lidl to be able to roll out campaigns at scale.

Implementation Case Study: #letswow

For the #letswow fashion campaign, Lidl’s first-ever fashion testimonial collaboration, the company took to social media, mainly focusing on Instagram. Activating the campaign on not just any social media channel, but the right channel for this audience segment, allowed Lidl to penetrate the fashion and beauty market, a new category for the company.

On an international level, six influencers were used for the campaign which resulted in an earned media value of 4.1 million € - an average of 683,333 € per influencer. Nationally, for example in Germany, Lidl worked with 37 influencers, resulting in an earned media value of 7.4 million€ - an average of 200,000€ per influencer.

Influencer marketing helped Lidl significantly improve its social equity and successfully expand from discount groceries into the fashion and beauty industry – a move that has opened the brand up to new audiences and diverse age groups who are in the market for different merchandise than its original core consumer.